The GAME progress (week 3)

Goal 1: To create more authentic real life lessons to engage my students in critical thinking.

My goal seems to be like many novice teachers, having not enough experience in creating life like lessons in the world of mathematics. Often in this subject area, we have many students with a variety of learning styles and with many gaps to go along with this already challenging scenario.

My action last week was to invite teachers that I formerly work with to my Facebook. By becoming friends, we are able to share ideas when possible. Most of my colleagues have access to Facebook with their mobile phones since this wonderful collaborative software is blocked from their school. This allowed me to ask questions creating a nice atmosphere to collaborate and anyone who is willing or is fascinated will read or contribute. So far, I have had a few hits with discussions. Not only is this a great way to collaborate, but also a great way to record data and keeping it onto a server where I have the ability to access anywhere as long as there is internet. Another action that I did was to manually call my student teaching mentor and the head department of mathematics to ask for advice on certain lesson plans that I tended to have low success levels. While engaged in conversation with my mentors, I have the ability to take notes on my lesson plans, and take time to reevaluate what I have to enrich the lessons for better success. In addition to these steps I have taken, I would also need to purchase a large binder to hold all my revised lessons so that I all my new lessons will be in order and ready to be executed.

Because this is the beginning of my journey through the GAME plan (2009), I feel that I am not completely into the program yet, but just getting it started so that next week, the collaboration will begin on a larger note. I understand that teachers are very busy with their own lesson plans, and that is where Facebook becomes so convenient. By revising my lesson plans, I will see more engagement of the students, as well as better scores, and better attitudes. Hopefully, I will have great collaboration on my Facebook and a nice large notebook full of new ideas in my revised lesson plans.

For my evaluation, I have not accomplished much, just a little bit of collaboration with my former mentors. I have learned much and in hopes to become like them in the future. I know I will be there. For now, I am still in the beginning of the stages, thus it is too early to evaluate.

Goal 2: To incorporate more technology into the classroom not limiting to PowerPoint and streaming.

My action for this goal is to again collaborate with my colleagues and former mentors. However, since they are more helpful in creating the lesson, the Instructor of Technology may be more helpful in this case. This week, I was not able to collaborate with him, however hopefully I will in the future during this course. For the meantime, I will collaborate with my colleagues in Walden University and read more than the necessary required readings to expand my knowledge of the new technology in the corporate world. As for my Facebook, I have become a friend to an Examiner of local Dallas for Technology. Every week, I see a piece of writing about new software or new ways of using software on my Home page. Though his is just beginning his Examiner career, I cannot wait until he starts to find more and more information to where he is putting a posting a day. Also, I have added some technology blogs in blog reader to view what is new or the talk about in the future. It is interesting to see what is happening and what is developing as well. Not only is this great, but sometimes deals on the internet are advertised, for example, I was able to download two types of software for free when they would have initially cost $50 if downloaded some other time. Although, they are just converters, but it would be nice to convert an .avi to DVD format. If you have a student that is having trouble, you could make a video and send it home. They would be able to play it in their DVD players. This will help if I am absent, they can watch a video of me teaching, causing the class to not be behind so much upon my arrival. The materials that I need are my laptop, converting software, blank DVDs and CDs, Facebook, internet, and my blog.

As for my monitoring, just watching my technology use in the classroom is great way to indicate if I am using technology to enrich my lessons. Also, a binder with many saved streaming and DVDs as well, so I will be able to do this again with future students.

For my evaluation, I feel it is a little too early to evaluate my progress since this is only the beginning of the journey for this goal.